Contributors


Joe Austin is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. This research is in Post-1945 U.S. cultural history, with specialties in urban history, the history of children and youth, and popular culture. He is currently doing research for a book on the emergence of African American teenagers in U.S. central cities between 1940 and 1970. His recent publications include "More to See Than a Canvas in a White Cube: For an Art in the Streets," City 14:1 (2010).

Elisa Bordin teaches American Literature at the University of Trieste and the University of Padua, Italy. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Verona, and has studied at the University of Arizona while completing her dissertation on masculinity and Westerns. She has worked on Chicano literature, African American and African Cuban literature, race and ethnic studies, and is now completing an article on the transnational aspect of graffiti in Italy. «elisa.bordin.1@unipd.it»

Matthew Burns is an Assistant Professor of English at Heritage University in central Washington. Writing and photographing traditional aerosol graffiti since the mid-90s, he has, in the last ten years, moved toward a more academic engagement with the medium. His essays on the history and contemporary practice of hobo/railworker "moniker" art on North American freight trains have appeared in Folk Art and Ragazine.

Mariam Esseghaier is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University. Her research focuses on the consumption practices, the commodification, and the representations of fashion and Muslim women in popular culture.

Jeff Ferrell is currently Professor of Sociology at Texas Christian University, USA, and Visiting Professor of Criminology at the University of Kent, UK. He is the author of the books Crimes of Style, Tearing Down the Streets, Empire of Scrounge, and, with Keith Hayward and Jock Young, Cultural Criminology: An Invitation, winner of the 2009 Distinguished Book Award from the American Society of Criminology's Division of International Criminology. He is also the co-editor of the books Cultural Criminology, Ethnography at the Edge, Making Trouble, Cultural Criminology Unleashed, and Cultural Criminology: Theories of Crime. Jeff Ferrell is the founding and current editor of the New York University Press book series Alternative Criminology, and one of the founding editors of the journal Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal, winner of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers' 2006 Charlesworth Award for Best New Journal. In 1998 he received the Critical Criminologist of the Year Award from the Division of Critical Criminology of the American Society of Criminology.

Natalie Hegert is an art critic, editor for the contemporary art website ArtSlant, and the curatorial director of the public art organization Your Art Here. She completed her undergraduate degree from Long Island University's Global College in 2007 with an area of concentration in Art and Social Change, where she wrote her senior thesis on graffiti and street art and its interaction with the urban environment. In 2012, Natalie recieved her Masters degree in art history and theory at Hunter College, New York, where her primary focus was on contemporary art, photography, and graffiti and street art. Her master's thesis chronicled the first instances of exhibitions of graffiti art in commercial galleries in New York City from the early 1970s to the late 1980s. She is currently working on a book of graffiti art history and theory. Email: «natalie@artslant.com»; twitter: @nataliehegert

Liz Kinnamon holds a degree in Gender, Women's and Sexuality studies from the University of Georgia. Her current project maps the history and possibilities of "exposure" within abject economic circumstances, and her interests endure in the areas of language, labor, prefigurative politics, intimacy, and normativity. She currently lives and writes in Atlanta, GA.

John Lennon is an assistant professor of English at The University of South Florida. His research is principally concerned with how marginalized individuals exert a politicized voice in collectivized actions. His monograph, Boxcar Politics: The Hobo in Literature and Culture 1869-1956, that explores how writers and riders created powerful dissenting working class voices outside of fixed hierarchal organizations, is currently under review. His work has appeared in various edited volumes and journals including American Studies, Acoma, Americana: Journal of American Popular Culture and Midwestern Miscellany. His article on graffiti and gentrification in Brooklyn was published in Rhizomes 19: «http://www.rhizomes.net/issue19/lennon/index.html». He can be reached at «jflennon@usf.edu» or twitter: @hoboacademic.

Jessica N. Pabón is completing her PhD dissertation, "The 'Art of Getting Ovaries': Female Graffiti Artists and the Politics of Presence in Graffiti Subculture," in the Department of Performance Studies at NYU. She won an AAUW American Dissertation Fellowship, received Honorable Mention from the Ford Foundation, and was an invited speaker for the 2012 TEDxWomen conference in Washington DC. She is also the curator for bOb gallery in NYC. She blogs about her research and monthly exhibitions at: «artofgettingovaries.wordpress.com». Email: «jnp250@nyu.edu»

Gabriel Soldatenko is an Assistant Professor of philosophy at Kennesaw State University. His main area of interest is in social and political philosophy where he critically brings together three distinct fields: contemporary continental philosophy, particularly through Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre; Latin American philosophy, through the burgeoning coloniality/decoloniality group, which includes the work of scholars like Enrique Dussel, Santiago Castro-Gomez, Maria Lugones and Walter Mignolo; and the area of U.S. Latina/o studies. All this, to flesh out the philosophical concept of power, the philosophical value of everyday life, and the practical content of urban social space, such that, we can re-frame and broaden our understanding of political agency and survival within marginalized communities.